Many organizations, including businesses, government agencies, and non-profit institutions, are constantly accumulating information related to their activities. Common sources of information may include, for example, emails, intranet pages, memoranda, work product, manuals, and the like. Useful knowledge may be revealed from this information both implicitly (e.g., by patterns in the information) and explicitly (e.g., by a document that summarizes a particular activity of an organization).
Sharing knowledge between individuals within an organization may provide a variety of benefits, including increased efficiency and improved decision making. Accordingly, many organizations devote substantial resources to collecting and managing information of all sorts. Even when substantial and consistent effort is expended to distill and organize knowledge from a large volume of information, e.g., by producing a comprehensive operations manual, the effort required to access the knowledge may prevent many people from taking advantage of it. Of course, many organizations do not maintain any comprehensive repositories of knowledge whatsoever, and in these organizations the benefits of knowledge sharing are even more limited.
Several elements may be required to make use of shared knowledge, and increasing the efficiency of any or all of these elements may increase the benefits derived from such knowledge. Elements may include, for example, (1) considering the possibility that shared knowledge exists when faced with a particular problem; (2) identifying a source of such knowledge; and (3) finding the desired knowledge within the source.
Ideally, knowledge will be provided at the moment it is needed. If knowledge is provided too early, its usefulness may not be apparent or it may be forgotten before it can be used. If knowledge is provided too late, the need itself may be forgotten and more effort may be required to use the knowledge. Making access to shared knowledge more efficient also makes it easier to provide knowledge at the moment it is most useful.